Author: Phyllis Swartz

“We need proof you’re married,” the man at the social security office says.

So my husband and I walk two blocks down Main Street to the Madison County Courthouse to get that proof.

On the day before our wedding, nearly fifty years ago, we had come to this courthouse. That day, we climbed the stairs under the skylight and entered the Probate Court office to apply for our marriage license.

They asked us some questions—whether we were habitual drunkards, whether we were imbeciles, insane, or under the influence of liquor or narcotic drugs, and whether we were of nearer kin than second cousins. We affirmed that none of this was true and signed on the dotted line.

Today, the clerk brings a leather-bound record book to the counter. She pages through the years to 1975. And there it is—the very paper we signed.

“Look at the occupations we listed,” my husband says.

He’s a beekeeper; I’m a licensed practical nurse.

How our lives have changed. On that pre-wedding day, neither of us dreamed that fifty years later, we’d be living, not in Michigan, but in Ohio, two blocks from the courthouse. Or that we would have retired from decades of teaching and counseling and church work.

Proof of our marriage in hand, we walk home through the chill of a clear, spring day in the small town that’s been our home for 45 years. It’s an ordinary day. But it’s also a moment to mark.

We’re seventy years old and applying for social security. We’re grayed, a little creakier, somewhat slower. We always knew this aging would happen. But we’re a bit surprised at how fast it’s come.

And we have now what we hoped for back then—a love that’s grown stronger, deepened by decades of shared experiences, many wonderful, some hard.

It seemed a bit ludicrous, after all these years, to prove our marriage.

But as it turns out, the man from social security gave us more than an errand. He gave us a gift—the chance to look back and remember.

It’s an image I’ll long remember—my Uncle Carl’s coffin on a farm wagon hitched to the first tractor he ever bought, a John Deere 520. And surrounded by grandchildren, twenty-two of them, sitting on long benches along the wagon sides, taking their last ride with Grandpa.

All that long funeral day, it was the grandchildren who caught most at my emotions. They were a beautiful bunch, young and strong, a few having crossed thresholds into careers and parenthood, a few in the primary grades, and the rest in between. During the reading of the obituary, each of their names were spoken, all twenty-two, one by one and with feeling.

At the cemetery, some of them carried their grandpa to his grave. Others stood close, linking arms. And still others supported their parents with an arm on a shoulder or the squeeze of a hand.

But what gripped me most was the ride back to the church for the funeral meal. As the tractor pulled the wagon up the hill, I could see the grandchildren once again lining the wagon sides. And between them, the now-empty wagon bed.

The funeral meal was subdued. At first. But soon stories took up again. Someone chuckled. Someone else laughed. And gradually, the banter began.

It had been a hard day. And a good one.

For the young and for the old.

“I’m so glad I came,” my mom said on our way back to Ohio. “So glad I went to the graveside.”

It was brutally cold that burial day, for all of us. Even the grandchildren shivered. We had triple-bundled my mom. Still, she began to shiver. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and offered a coat. Someone else brought a hunting jacket. And someone a hoodie. We piled them over her like blankets until she was ensconced in her graveside chair.

I’ve been home for a week. But I still hold images of the young and the old: my ninety-six-old mom sitting under wraps and a set of grieving grandkids.

We’re taking my ninety-six-year-old mom to bury her little brother. She’s reclined in the van seat beside me, two coats over her, another three layers underneath, and the car heater blowing.

“After the funeral tomorrow,” she says, “I want to go to the graveside service.”

This will be in the mountains on a cold spring day.

She’ll sit there in a winter coat we packed for the occasion and hear words of comfort before the casket is lowered into the earth. This cemetery scene has become familiar to her, having now lost three older siblings and five younger.

Of this warm, generous-spirited family of eleven children, only my mom and her youngest sister will be there to hear the nephews form a men’s chorus to sing a final farewell for their last uncle. One other living sister will be at home in bed, unaware of the shrinking of what was once a large family.

And still is. From those eleven came—at last count— 55 children, 165 grandchildren, 274 great-grandchildren, and 35 great-great grandchildren. With in laws, the family numbers well over 700.

My mom and her youngest sister might be bereft of siblings as they pay their respects to their brother. Nonetheless, they will be surrounded by a clan.

But many of the 700 will be missing. Not because Uncle Carl isn’t loved or worth memorializing, not because they don’t care. But because they do—about children and grandchildren and students and clients and employers and employees.

They’ll be out there living like a Bender—honoring Uncle Carl by doing the good they can with warm and generous spirits.

It was a marvelous, once-in-a-childhood day. Because of a telephone. Actually, because of two telephones, both in our house for that one day. And one was mine.

It hung on the wall—a mahogany box, with a crank on one side and a receiver on the other. One more day, and the telephone company would take this phone away, leaving us with only the strange new rotary phone they had just installed.

But for one day, because my parents had use of the new phone, the old one was mine. And I could crank it to call my friends on our party line as much as I wanted.

All day we talked, Gertrude and Alice and I—about little-kid things, like how they cut a new paper family from the Sears catalog. And how I shook red paint in an empty catsup bottle for a make-believe grocery. And how the telephone company was coming to school to show us how to use a rotary phone so we could teach our parents. We talked and did our chores, talked and ate lunch, talked and set the table for supper.

After that delightful day of unrestrained jabber, I never saw telephone wires the same way again. Those lines strung in the sky—how could they carry so many words from so many people so fast?

Years later, I found someone else who marveled at this, the poet Carl Sandburg:

I am a copper wire slung in the air.
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying.
     A copper wire.

But the magic didn’t stop with a copper wire.

More than half a century later, words no longer need wires. Now, words from my cell phone ride invisible radio waves that somehow land in a grandkid’s phone in Kentucky or Illinois.

And not just words. Images. And not just images. Moving images. And what next?

That marvel I felt as a kid—it keeps coming back.

I catch my ninety-two-year-old father nodding off at his desk. This doesn’t happen often. But there he is, hands on the keyboard, eyes closed, and a slight whiffling snore coming from his mouth. The cursor on his Word document blinks away.

He hadn’t heard me on the stairs. And doesn’t hear me call his name. But when I touch his shoulder, his eyes fly open, his head jerks, and his hands shoot up.

“How could I fall asleep,” he asks, “in the middle of the Civil War?”

I don’t know what my father read that morning. Perhaps, a report like this one, written by a soldier after the Battle of First Manassas:

There were piles of legs, feet, hands and arms, all thrown together, and at a distance, resembled piles of corn at a corn-shucking.  Many of the feet still retained a boot or shoe. Wounded men were lying on tables and surgeons, some of whom at the time were very unskillful, were carving away, like farmers in butchering season, while the poor devils under the knife yelled with pain.  Many limbs were lost that should have been saved, and many lives were lost in trying to save limbs that should have been amputated…

To my dad, history is not just facts and events. I’ve seen the sudden glistening in his eyes when he makes another’s pain his own.

“Such sorrow,” he says now, shaking his head, “and I fall asleep.”

It’s amazing, the pull of sleep. It draws me into oblivion at unthinkable times—when I overnight in a hospital room, for example, while my dad groans in his bed. Though I fight to stay awake through the dark night watches, just before dawn, sleep takes me down.

Sleep is more than a luxury. Like food, our bodies crave it. But though our bodies can’t force us to eat, they can put us to sleep, even behind the wheel of a car or in a hospital room or when we are reading about the Civil War.

And as we sleep, our bodies reset. And our brains. Perhaps the best path from despondency to hope is sleep.

My dad’s micro nap got him going. As I leave, he’s already back in the Civil War, his computer keys clicking away.

You wouldn’t think a stack of catalogs could hold so many memories.

“I’m ready to give them away,” my mom said when we found them under the eaves of her attic.

But not without some stories. And what amazes me is how the Sears catalog has woven its way into my mother’s daily life.

Way in.

It’s pages used as toilet paper, for example.

“I’d get in trouble,” my mom said, “for staying in the outhouse too long. It was more fun to leaf through catalog than to do dishes.”

With summer, spring, fall, and winter editions, new 1000-page catalogs kept showing up the in the mailbox. Beyond the outhouse, these “Big Books,” as they were called, served as booster seats and doorstops. Their pages were torn out to clean windows and sometimes crumpled up for insulation in walls.

My memory doesn’t stretch back to a catalog in the outhouse. But some of this story comes down to me. I sat on a stack of catalogs at my grandma’s kitchen table and folded their pages to make doorstops. And my own attic holds scraps from old Sears catalogs—paper people cut from their pages.

I spent hours naming these people, assembling them into families, and seating them together on church benches made from folded catalog pages. My favorite was a little girl named Karen, who wore a pink coat with a pink, lace-edged cap

Times have changed. Sears is almost gone. Big Books no longer land in mailboxes four times a year, Sears stores no longer dot the country, and the eaves of my parents’ attic are now emptied of catalogs.

But the Big Books they saved all these years still hold value. They’ve found their way to my daughter-in-law’s university classroom, where she uses them for sociology exercises, helping her students uncover stories of the past.

I’m not always sure what my grandkids are saying.

“Are you glazing us, Grandma?” one of them asked at the end of what I thought was a satisfying late- night talk.

Glazing them?

My grandma always glazed the Sunday dinner ham, not me.

My grandkids use words like cap—meaning unbelievable.  And big mad—a way to describe anger. And skibidi, which my grandson explains is a throw-around word that can mean anything. You can use it when you don’t know what else to say.

Skibidi— I’ll remember this the next time I can’t find just the right word.

There’s a whole list of these words: slay (not meaning kill), rizz (nothing to do with getting up in the morning), and flex (no connection to bending with the times). This emerging lingo tempts me to roll my eyes with others in my generation.

But I remember another set of words—groovy, far out, jive, dig it, turkey, bummer—talk that was cool (not meaning chilly) back in the days of peace signs and maxi dresses and bell-bottomed jeans, back when I promised myself not to roll my eyes when I was old.

And I recall telling my students that Shakespeare messed with the language. He changed nouns into verbs (Unhair thy head) and married two words into one (eyeball, madcap, green-eyed). And invented language he needed—skim milk and night owl and wild goose chase.

So there you have it—my grandchildren and Shakespeare—playing with words, helping the language evolve.

I looked up glazing. And that’s not what I was doing in that late evening talk. I wasn’t biased or overhyping. I meant every word I said from the bottom of a grandma’s heart.

But, like my grandma, I did glaze a ham for Sunday dinner.

I sit in a chemo center with my little sister. She tells me how kind people have been—food, prayers, cards, letters, texts.

And she tells me about the gift from our father.

“I feel helpless,” my dad had said to me when he heard about my sister’s cancer.

His legs are lame, his hands hurt, and the three blocks of winter weather between his house and hers daunt him.

Still, he had an idea—one he felt reluctant to suggest.

“I could call her every day,” he said, “with a history lesson.”

Well!

But, you know, they’ve rarely missed a day.

For about an hour, Dad takes my sister away from her life to a time when our ancestors met secretly in caves to worship. And to long goodbyes when people gathered at the homes of departing immigrants to sing:

Now have come the time and hour
To travel to America.
The wagon by the door now stands
With wife and children, we will go.
And when we come to Baltimore,
We’ll hold our hands upraised
And shout a word of victory.
Now we’re in America!

My sister has heard about castles and milkmaids and plowboys. And about the years of driving dangerously, when people shouted whoa to stop their cars, and especially about an accident of her great-grandfather, which resulted in the death of a young boy.

My dad has talked about the distilleries of his great-grandparents and how a man who had too much to drink brought his horse into the house and commanded it to step over the cradle of his sleeping baby.

My sister now knows that my dad traded his suspenders for a belt when he was seventeen. And that his first suit with buttons, not hooks-and-eyes, was for his wedding.

And my dad even confessed a boyhood escapade—that sometimes, on his way home from school, he’d climb the steep bank to Strawberry Hill, an abandoned children’s home. And in the office of that empty orphanage, he’d browse with great interest through records of former orphans.

As my sister tells me all this, we’re here in the cancer center. Hopefully those in the cubicles around us are receiving their own gifts of support. But I wonder, how many of them get a daily history lesson from a ninety-two-year-old father?

“Dad helps,” my sister says. “He gets me into other worlds, shows me I’m not the only one with problems.”

I keep trying to forget the other grandma. She sits on the opposite side of the bleachers, her hair as silvered as mine, a fuchsia scarf around her neck, and her hands clenched in her lap, much as mine would be if the scoreboard flipped the numbers.

All through this basketball season, there’s been some grandma sitting over there. Sometimes the hair is coiffured, sometimes a no-nonsense wash-and-dry, sometimes bundled at the nape. Sometimes the grandma looks like she’s rushed in from the office wearing a blazer. Other times you’d think she just untied her apron and come straight from the kitchen. Whoever the grandma, she’s for the opposing team.

If she’s like me, she’s learned more about basketball than she ever thought she would—what palming is and goal tending and a five-second violation. She now understands the difference between an outside cut and an inside cut and between a personal foul and a technical foul.

And if she’s like me, she watches more than the game. She studies her grandson’s face for signs of desperation or accomplishment. She hopes to see him hold a temper, help a fallen opponent off the gym floor, and keep trying, even when he knows he’s lost. And she hopes to not see him crumpled on the court with a torn ACL.

Like me, she’s glad to be on the sidelines for her grandson, to feel the rise and fall of the ball and the emotions. Kids know who’s in the stands. And she hopes her presence now will help her grandson feel her with him long after she’s gone.

But for today, she wants her grandson’s team to win. She pictures him going to sleep this night savoring the three-point shots and the swishing free throws and the coach’s thumbs up.

Mine isn’t the only grandson out there—this is what the grandma of the fuchsia scarf in the opposing bleachers keeps reminding me.

Still . . . if I had to choose . . .